For those at Lorraine Motel when MLK was killed, what does it mean to witness martyrdom?

Martin Luther King’s life changed America. Here’s how his death changed it, as seen through the life of a young woman who was at the Lorraine Motel when he was shot 50 years ago.
Michael Schwab/USA TODAY NETWORK - Tennessee

Martin Luther King Jr. with his aides, from left, Hosea Williams, Jesse Jackson and the Rev. Ralph Abernathy at the Lorraine Motel on April 3, 1968.(Photo: Associated Press)

MEMPHIS – Many Americans remember where they were when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated April 4, 1968, at the Lorraine Motel. A few were actually there.

We know what became of some of them. King’s deputy Ralph Abernathy struggled to fill his shoes. Jesse Jackson ran for president. Andrew Young became a congressman, a mayor and an ambassador.

What about the less celebrated bystanders? How does proximity to such an act of historic violence change a person? What does it mean to be a witness to martyrdom?

The stories of those who were at the Lorraine that day offer some answers. The witnesses include:

• Earl Caldwell, a New York Times reporter, had dreamed of being on the scene when a big story broke instead of having to play catch up afterward. He would get his wish.

• Joseph Louw, a documentary filmmaker driven by apartheid from his native South Africa, was drawn to King’s promise of racial reconciliation. He would become — for a week — the most celebrated photographer in America.

• James Laue, a federal observer sympathetic to King, was one of the Lorraine's two white guests. He said the Memphis sanitation workers strike, which King was in town to support, could revive the civil rights movement by recapturing the spirit of Montgomery and Selma.

• Three Louisville-based civil rights activists: A.D. King, King’s brother; Georgia Davis, Kentucky’s first black state senator and one of Martin Luther King’s lovers, who came to Memphis at his request; and Lucretia “Lukey” Ward, the motel’s other white guest, who was having an affair with A.D. King.

• Loree Bailey ran the motel (named for her by her husband and co-owner) where King and other black celebrities usually stayed in segregated Memphis. Bailey’s establishment faced an uncertain future, and she was in her last hours.

• Ben Branch, a saxophonist, was scheduled to play with his band that night at King’s strike rally. He received a musical request he could not honor.

• Billy Kyles, a minister, was at the Lorraine to take King and his entourage to his house for dinner. At home, his daughter Dwania — at 12, already a veteran of the civil rights struggle — was excitedly helped her mother prepare.

At 6 that evening, Caldwell, Louw, Laue, Davis, A.D. King and Ward were in their rooms. Bailey was in the motel office. Branch stood in the courtyard parking lot, where Martin King — looking down from the second-floor balcony — asked him to play the gospel classic Precious Lord that night. Kyles was on the balcony, walking toward the staircase.

When he heard a shot, Laue rushed from his room to King’s side with a towel and a blanket. Louw began taking photos of the scene. Kyles ran into King’s room to call an ambulance, but Bailey, who operated the switchboard, had run into the courtyard to see what was happening.

She was distraught and discombobulated — an hour away from a fatal stroke.

As he dashed out of his room, Caldwell thought he saw something across the street — a white man emerging from some bushes. Davis, who was checking herself in the mirror before dinner, opened her door and looked up to see King’s leg on the balcony.

Within an hour, King was dead.

And none of the witnesses was ever the same.

The reporter

Earl Caldwell of The New York Times, June 29, 1972.(Photo: AP)

Earl Caldwell says being the only reporter at the Lorraine helped make his career and helped mar it.

He went on to cover the Black Power movement and became the focus of a landmark legal battle when the government tried to force him to testify about the Black Panthers. He became a columnist for New York's Daily News.

He never accepted investigators’ conclusion that James Earl Ray, acting alone, fired the fatal shot from the window of a rooming house across the street. He says that years later, when he insisted that he saw a man in the bushes and expressed skepticism about the official explanation, he moved from being a reporter to, in some eyes, "a conspiracy nut.''

“As a reporter, you never wanted to be part of the story,’’ Caldwell says. “I almost wish I wasn’t there. I’d have been better off if they’d flown me down the next day.’’

The photographer

Joseph Louw had his photo published in LIFE magazine. It was the seminal image of the tragedy, and his future seemed assured. But a year later, he moved back to Africa, where few people realized he’d shot the Lorraine photo. And he didn’t tell them.

Louw was traveling with King for a public television documentary. He had fled to the USA from his native South Africa in 1963. Under that nation’s apartheid system, he was classified as ‘’coloured" — mixed white and black — and charged with having (consensual) sex with a white woman.

Those who knew him speculate about why he left America to practice journalism (first in Kenya, later in South Africa).John Ankele, an American friend, says Louw keenly felt the loss of hope that King’s death symbolized, “so he went back to what he knew.’’

Louw understood what he was leaving. Years later, his son Jacob found an invitation to the White House from 1968. “He laughed," Jacob recalls. "He said, ‘Yeah, I was a big deal.’ "

After the Lorraine, “he didn’t ride the train" of celebrity journalism, Jacob says. “He felt there were other stories to tell … African stories."

Louw’s greatest satisfaction in Africa came from farming. He brought in three harvests before he died of cancer in 2003 at 64. U.S. newspapers and websites didn't carry his obituary.

The observer

U.S. Justice Department staffer James Laue(Photo: Courtesy of George Mason University)

James Laue, the Justice Department observer, went on to become a pioneer in the field of conflict resolution, and he founded one of the first university programs in the discipline. In 1984, he helped establish the U.S. Institute for Peace, a federal agency that promotes conflict resolution.

Laue, obscured in most of Louw's Lorraine photos, never volunteered that he was there. But others remembered him. In his autobiography, Abernathy described a white man on the balcony after King fell, “frightened enough to be crawling on his hands and knees but brave enough to bring a blanket to spread over Martin."

Shortly before his death in 1993 at 56, Laue wrote that King’s “life — and his death — changed my life." He always denied that King saw non-violence as “a tactic to use against your enemy." Rather, he argued, it was “a strategy to convert your enemy."

The senator

Georgia Davis Powers, right, a former Kentucky state senator and the first black state senator, accepts a Kentucky Civil Rights Hall of Fame 2000 Inaugural Inductee award from Beverly Watts, executive director of the Kentucky Commission on Human Rights, on July 18, 2000, in Louisville.(Photo: Patti Longmire, AP)

Georgia Davis had a distinguished career in Kentucky politics and civil rights, but she became famous as Martin Luther King’s lover. In a 1995 memoir, she said she and King (who’d been married for 15 years and had four children) slept together at the Lorraine the night before he was killed.

Davis, Lukey Ward and A.D. King were vacationing in Florida when King asked her to come to Memphis. They’d already become lovers. She was 44 — five years older than him — and in the process of a divorce. His attentions, she wrote, were particularly flattering at the time.

The three arrived at the Lorraine the night of April 3, met up with King and others and talked into the early morning. When she went to her room, she wrote in her memoir, I Shared the Dream, King followed — as they both knew he would. “Senator," she said he told her, using his nickname for her, “our time together is so short."

After King’s murder, Davis was angry and haunted. “I don’t know how I survived 1968," she wrote. “The world seemed upside down."

But she was not undone. She was not the love of his life, nor he of hers. If anything, she was energized. “I vowed to take the valuable lessons I learned from him with me, and to use them," she wrote. The crucial lessons: Stay in touch with the grass roots, and beware the enticements of power and privilege.

Some of King’s former aides called her description of her liaison with King a lie, although she was merely corroborating what Abernathy implied in his autobiography six years earlier. Anyway, she said, the most common reaction from women was “I wish it had been me!"

King’s affairs with Davis (and others) may make him seem more human. In 2015, the year before she died at 92, Davis wrote that King told her at the Lorraine that “sometimes the load of being a leader gets almost too heavy to bear. Everyone expects you to be perfect."

The musician

A copy of jazz saxophonist Ben Branch's album, "The Last Request," rests on a table at the Memphis home of his widow, Vivian. Branch spoke to Martin Luther King Jr. moments before he was shot at the Lorraine Motel.(Photo: Yalonda M. James, Memphis Commercial Appeal, USA TODAY NETWORK - TENNESSEE)

Ben Branch, who received King’s last musical request, never said much about what he saw at the Lorraine “He was not a talkative person to begin with," says his widow, Vivian. “And that really shut him up."

There was one change, she says. After King’s murder, “he didn’t like to play nightclubs. He preferred churches." That was where he was stricken on Aug. 23, 1987 — Tabernacle Baptist Church in Chicago. He died four days later. He was 64.

The motel owner

Loree Bailey went to her room at the motel and lay down after King was shot. She lapsed into a coma and died five days later, the Tuesday of King’s funeral. She was 58.
Her husband Walter hung a wreath on the door of Room 306 — it would “go down in history as the most famous motel room in the world," he said — and never rented it out again.

Over the next few years, the Lorraine declined as more affluent black travelers, afforded options by new civil rights laws, stayed elsewhere. The place became an SRO hotel before closing in 1988.

Earlier, a civic group had bought it, planning for what became in 1991 the National Civil Rights Museum. The Baileys’ humble motel became a national shrine.

The brother and his lover

A.D. King, brother of Martin Luther King Jr., is pictured in this undated photo. A.D., traumatized by his brother's murder, struggled to fill his shoes. A heavy drinker who suffered from depression, A.D. King was found dead the following year in his backyard swimming pool in what was ruled an accidental drowning. He was 38, a year younger than Martin when he died.(Photo: AP)

A.D. King and Lukey Ward, each married with children, broke off their affair when King was called to Atlanta after his brother's death to take his pulpit.

A.D., traumatized by his brother's murder, struggled to fill his shoes. A heavy drinker who suffered from depression, A.D. was found dead the following year in his backyard swimming pool in what was ruled an accidental drowning. He was 38, a year younger than Martin when he died.

Lucretia "Lukey" Ward(Photo: Kentucky Commission on Human Rights)

Ward withdrew from the civil rights movement and from the world outside home. Aside from some political campaigns -- including those of her son Mike, who was elected to Congress in 1994 -- the extroverted activist became a virtual recluse. She died in 1996 at 74.

What happened at the Lorraine “really threw her for a loop," her son says. “She got better in time, but she was not the same person after as she was before."

As a first-grader she’d been one of the “Memphis 13," the first students to integrate the public schools. “I was always the first this, the first that," she recalls.

After the Lorraine, “I witnessed a sorrow I did not know existed. It was the first time I saw grown men cry. … I was freaked out." She left Memphis for college and created a life in New York City.

Her father continued to dwell on his presence when King was shot. In sermons and speeches until his death in 2016 at 81, Kyles described his struggle to understand the reason he'd been there: He was meant to be a witness.

His daughter understood what it had cost him. In bed at night after the shooting, she heard her father's nightmare screams in the next room. Leaving Memphis, she says, was her way of healing; his was talking about what happened at the Lorraine.